The Suiciders tells the story of seven young men “permanently in their late teens.” Zach, Lukas, Adam, Matthew, Peter, Arnold, and Taylor are outsiders squatting together in abandoned house in an unnamed American suburb. They decide to take a “road trip to the end of the world,” a conceit from which the title is drawn and on which the plot is constructed.

One of the perks of fiction reviewing is that it often forcibly exposes me to books that might not organically enter my sphere of attention. Like many, I suspect, I not-so-intentionally choose culture that reinforces rather than challenges my pre-conceived ideas about the world in which I live, I do wish to stretch beyond the safe, boring familiarity of my comfort zone. Samuel R. Delany’s new novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (Magnus Books) is certainly a book capable of assisting with that goal.

Set primarily in the late 1950s in the California town of Bakersfield, the novel juxtaposes the circumstances of a small town romance that goes horribly wrong beside a fictional account of the making of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (part of which was filmed in Bakersfield).